This book is dedicated with love

       to Cathy (Couturier) Towle, who reminds us always why family is so wonderful.

      CONTENTS

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      PART ONE: THE RENT-AN-ARMY WAR

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      CHAPTER 3

      CHAPTER 4

      CHAPTER 5

      CHAPTER 6

      CHAPTER 7

      CHAPTER 8

      CHAPTER 9

      CHAPTER 10

      CHAPTER 11

      CHAPTER 12

      CHAPTER 13

      CHAPTER 14

      CHAPTER 15

      CHAPTER 16

      CHAPTER 17

      CHAPTER 18

      PART TWO: THE END OF CIVIL TWILIGHT

      CHAPTER 19

      CHAPTER 20

      CHAPTER 21

      CHAPTER 22

      CHAPTER 23

      CHAPTER 24

      CHAPTER 25

      CHAPTER 26

      CHAPTER 27

      CHAPTER 28

      CHAPTER 29

      CHAPTER 30

      CHAPTER 31

      CHAPTER 32

      CHAPTER 33

      CHAPTER 34

      CHAPTER 35

      CHAPTER 36

      CHAPTER 37

      CHAPTER 38

      CHAPTER 39

      CHAPTER 40

      CHAPTER 41

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      My deepest thanks to Sheriff Lee Baca for free and open access to the resources of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Special thanks also to Homicide Detective Paul Delhauer and Deputy William Moulder for their patient and excellent guidance. Retired Homicide Detective Melinda Hearne was also great about answering my dumb questions. Deepest appreciation also to Linda McFadden (the plot queen), and Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy Gary Bale. And where would novelists be without fabulous investigative reporters whose work fuels the background research? I’m particularly indebted to Miles Corwin, P. W. Singer, Anne Garrels and William Langewiesche. Finally, I can’t fail to mention Kayla Williams, whose wonderful memoir Love My Rifle More Than You taught me so much about being a Western woman in Iraq and in the macho culture of the U.S. Army.

      Finally, thanks to my agent, Philip Spitzer, Miranda Stecyk, my editor (aka “Tijuana Mama”) and all the great people at MIRA—a joy to work with, one and all. And last but never least, Richard, Kate and Anna, the home team—without you, none of it means a darn thing.

      PART ONE

      The Rent-an-Army War

      “You cannot have trade without war, nor war without trade.”

      —Jan Coen, Governor General

       Dutch East Indies Company (c. 1619)

      “Hiring outsiders to fight your battles is as old as war itself.”

      —P. W. Singer: Corporate Warriors:

       The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (2003)

      CHAPTER

       1

      Tuesday, August 26, 2003

       Hamra Hotel: Baghdad, Iraq

      The tinny jangle of the ancient black telephone next to the bed startled Hannah. Jumping to her feet from her crouched position by her duffel bag on the floor, she leapt over her desert camo jacket and bulletproof Kevlar vest and caught the phone on the second bleat.

      “Hannah Nicks,” she said, wincing at the sharp pinch at her earlobe. It was caught between the receiver and one of the small gold earrings she’d forgotten to take off. Hooking the phone into the crook of her shoulder, she withdrew first the left, then the right stud and dropped them into the toiletry bag on the night table. The hotel room was furnished with battered blond Scandinavian furniture, an oddly modern contrast to the flood-lit palm trees and onion-domed mosque outside her window.

      It was after 11:00 p.m. but the temperature inside and out was still hot enough to soften the unlit candles scattered on every available surface of her room. She’d left matches strategically placed next to each one in anticipation of the next inevitable power outage. For now, the electricity was functioning, for all the good it did. The air conditioner was on the fritz and the light situation wasn’t much better. Two of the lamps in her room were missing bulbs, while that in the third couldn’t be higher than forty watts. Rummaging through her duffel bag, hunting for her good luck charm, Hannah had finally resorted to her high-powered Maglite to see where she’d stashed the tiny velvet drawstring bag that held Gabe’s first baby tooth.

      She’d already showered—with tepid and slightly brackish water, but she wasn’t complaining. The water supply, too, was intermittent, and she’d been lucky to get a chance to clean up at all after the long flight from the States. After the shower, she’d plaited her dark hair into a thick rope that reached almost to her shoulder blades, then dressed in desert camouflage pants, khaki T-shirt and sturdy tan hiking boots.

      Losing the little gold earrings was the last vestige of her femininity set aside. In the rent-an-army business that employed her these days, dressing for success took on a whole new meaning. She might enjoy being a girl, as the old song went, but right now, she needed to be in professional mode.

      “Ladwell here,” the voice on the phone said.

      Sean Ladwell was a Brit, ex-Special Air Services, that nation’s equivalent of the Green Berets. Pushing forty—a decade older than Hannah and looking twice that, with his ruddy, wind-weathered skin—Ladwell was rumored to have seen private army action in Sudan, Angola, the Congo and Afghanistan since the end of his stint with the SAS. This was apparently Ladwell’s third sortie into Iraq on a short-term private security gig.

      Currently, he was team leader of a small commando unit assembled by Brandywine International, a private military corporation headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. The assignment this time out: to extract two family members of a London-based Iraqi intellectual. Washington was courting the exiled academic to help form the new, post-Saddam regime. Rescuing his relatives, who’d become trapped in the war-torn Sunni Triangle, might go a long way to cementing the man’s cooperation.

      “We head out at midnight,” Ladwell said. “Meet up in the armory downstairs at twenty-three hundred hours to collect your ordnance and go over the plan once more.”

      “Roger,” Hannah said. “I’m good to go.”

      It had taken only twenty-one days for Baghdad and the thugocracy of Saddam Hussein to crumble before the American-led coalition, the latest in a long line of invaders to this region. Once called Mesopotamia, the world’s first great civilization, the country had been conquered repeatedly over the centuries—by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks and the British. Saddam’s repressive